The X-Axis – w/c 1 December 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #5. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Magik story, then. The basic idea here is that thank to the Bloodstones that were conjured by Belasco back in her origin story, when Illyana dies, she gets split into Illyana, whose soul goes to Belasco, and the Darkchild, who for no discernible reason winds up imprisoned by S’ym. So the story seems to be them manipulating S’ym and Belasco into going to war with each other in order that they can be reunited and escape Limbo. Since we know that the Darkchild winds up running Providence, this evidently doesn’t work out as planned. I can’t say I find any of this especially interesting. By its nature, it’s re-treading previous stories – to be fair, that’s partly the point – but they aren’t stories that I have any great desire to revisit in the first place. Belasco and S’ym aren’t very compelling characters and I don’t really see the point of this. I can imagine a world where the 2026 direction includes a bunch of things that were foreshadowed in “Age of Revelation”, which could run to Cyclops reporting back to Magik that she needs to do something about this before she died. But that’s still a Belasco story and I’m not very interested in that either.
AMAZING X-MEN #3. (Annotations here.) This is more like it. Sure, the pacing of Amazing X-Men is weird if you try to see it as a three-issue miniseries, because it isn’t one – it’s issues #2-4 of a storyline that also includes the Overture and Finale one-shots. And sure, all that the characters have really achieved in three issues is to travel to Philadelphia, without any apparent plans for what they’re going to do when they get there. But I don’t really mind any of that, because the relatively sparse main plot is leaving plenty of space for more subtle character work and for hints about the wider story. It’s not so much having Glob Herman turn into a psycho, which is kind of obvious. It’s having Psylocke seem more sympathetic than any of the supposed X-Men, and Schwarzchild coming across as the reasonable one among the future team when we’ve only seen him as a glorified henchman to date. The Beast subplot is working nicely – it seems fairly clear at this point that this is the Krakoan Beast, but it’s being set up in such a way that it’ll feel satisfying when it’s actually revealed – and throwing in the fact that nobody remembers the storyline about Magneto’s supposed degenerative disease is intriguing. Asrar’s art is consistently excellent as well, and playing to the book’s more character-driven strengths. Even though Jed MacKay’s two books are the ones carrying the weight of the plot for “Age of Revelation”, you can make a case too that Amazing X-Men does benefit from the existence of the wider event, since it’s helping to fill out a more-or-less consistent world that this book only has space to touch on.
BINARY #3. (Annotations here.) Jean Grey makes her inevitable return after ten years’ incubation within the Phoenix Force, and Binary heroically sacrifices herself so that Jean can be the sole Phoenix – after winning the townsfolk back on side again. I can see what this book is going for – Carol Danvers as a stand-in Phoenix who doesn’t really have the aptitude to wield it properly but does at least spend ten years holding it in check and protecting her home town in a way that’s both impressive and, by Phoenix standards, slightly underwhelming. And it all looks dramatic and shiny enough. But the end result doesn’t really work. Part of the problem is that it wants Carol Danvers to be an underdog rising to the challenge, which is a story you could have done with her twenty years ago, but feels weird now that her established portrayal is as the Marvel Universe’s most hyper-competent female hero. Once you’ve plugged a character so emphatically into the slot of “you don’t need expensive Wonder Woman, we have Carol Danvers at home”, it’s hard to go back.
There’s more to it, though. The town never feels convincingly like a place – what do these people do, other than go to meetings and get angry? Where do they get food? What do they do to pass the time? Are there children? If they’re dealing with people on the outside, how does that work? Does Revelation have any view at all about Phoenix being a potential problem to him? Madelyne Pryor’s role also requires you to think back to an earlier version of the character; it doesn’t fit within anything that’s been done to steer her in the direction of Limbo in the last few years. And once Jean has returned, nothing changes – she apparently just carries on defending the town. Of course, there’s a fundamental problem with using Phoenix in crossovers, which is that she’s so powerful that she immediately breaks the plot. But the solution to that is to not use Phoenix in crossovers. I certainly don’t want her to show up in Finale as a deus ex machina.
There’s the core of a half-decent story in here, but Carol Danvers was the wrong character to do it with. Maybe it would have worked with Firestar?
LAURA KINNEY: SABRETOOTH #3. (Annotations here.) Well, that didn’t work. And it’s not like Binary, which didn’t work, but you can see what it was going for and how that might have seemed like a worthwhile idea. This book feels fundamentally misconceived from the ground up, and then botches the execution on top of that – it’s weirdly paced, and not especially attractive to look at, with an artist who can’t draw children being asked to draw emotional sequences with a child. Even pinning down the core concept here is difficult. The material about Laura having marrying Sabretooth’s never-before-mentioned son never feeds into anything, but I’ll assume it might be a plot thread that gets picked up by Jody Houser in Generation X-23. At any rate, it certainly isn’t the core idea of this book. So the idea seems to be about Revelation manipulating Laura and her narration rationalising what she’s instructed to do, all while her overriding impulse is to protect her son within those parameters.
To the extent that any actual theme is discernible here, the final scene tries to tell us that Laura was especially vulnerable to manipulation because of her desire to belong. I don’t think I buy that as a reading of Laura’s character in the first place, but that’s beside the point: The whole premise of Revelation is that he can control everyone, so you just can’t do a “Laura was so easy to manipulate” story with that character. I wonder whether this started out as a story that was trying to make some sort of point about how Logan had to be broken to bring him under Revelation’s control, but Laura was so much easier to bring on side – but if so, the story really fails to bring that out. On top of that, we have a trip to Arakko that bears no resemblance to what we saw in the World of Revelation one-shot and simply reverts to the original, one-note version of Arakko, which was never any good. The emotional anchor of the final issue is a young boy whose only personality trait is CHILD. And the “everyone dies” ending might just about work if it was pitched as a cliffhanger into Finale, but when labelled simply as END it feels downright amateur.
God knows what went wrong with this book, because I can’t believe it got commissioned on the basis of a pitch that resembles what made it to the page. But the end result is seriously bad.
The X-men are going to be in what might be the biggest movie in the world next year. Creative teams may change but I’m pretty sure the X-Men as a comic are going to be around for a while yet.
@Diana: ‘MacKay[‘s] Moon Knight run’s been going for what, 50 issues now? 60? When was the last time a writer stayed for that long on an X-book?’
It has happened very recently. In a way, it hasn’t ended yet. Unfortunately, that man was Benjamin Percy, and the work he produced was 50 issues of X-Force (middling to good, but over-reliant on shlocky violence) alongside 50 issues of Wolverine (bad to middling, see also: shlocky violence) and continued with Hellverine (mini and no-longer-ongoing), Deadpool&Wolverine (no-longer-ongoing) and now moving onto Wade Wilson: Deadpool, specifically being released under the Shadows of Tomorrow banner (and supposed to be ongoing).
@Si- As mentioned earlier, the last we saw of Belasco in Ackerman’s Iron Man, he was serving masters who might or might not have been the same Elder Gods he served earlier. So Belasco being back in Limbo makes sense. You’re right about everything else, though.
It seems like longish runs by writers have come back into fashion at Marvel in the last decade or so.
Beyond the X-Books, we’ve had Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk, Kelly Thompson’s Captain Marvel, and Gerry Dugan’s Deadpool (initially with Brian Posehn).
Those are just the ones that use continuous issue numbers. Other series go through periodic renumberings (with varying degrees of storyline-based justification) to try to goose sales, even if they’re functionally the same run by the same writer.
And although MacKay’s Avengers are curtailed (seem to be? is it official he’s off the book after the so-called #800?), right before him Jason Aaron was on that book for over 60 issues, I think?
(I dropped out of that pretty early on, I much prefer MacKay’s run, even though it’s probably the weakest of his Marvel work).
On the whole, I still wouldn’t say long runs are commonplace at Marvel, but at least they’re happening.
Percy Jackson is either a hit or a miss; the first two years were good, but then, just like Krakoa, the quality dropped after Hickman left, imo.
Regarding creative teams changing, I have a hard time seeing Uncanny and X-Men changing, but I don’t doubt that the rest could change.
One thing I think is almost certain to change is Wolverine. I only see people talking badly about Ahmed, and the book sales don’t seem to be that good compared to Krakoa. And PKJ, who is an exclusive Marvel writer, has shown interest in writing it several times, so I’d say he would be the possible next writer. Besides, there’s still Doomsday and a Wolverine game to be released, so a relaunch or at least an announcement for 2027, maybe at NYCC, would make sense.
Ben Percy* sorry for putting Percy Jackson
I don’t get what Benjamin Percy has on Marvel to get so many series, but he’s certainly found his niche. Wolverine, Hellverine, Ghost Rider, Punisher–there must be an audience for his style. He’s not my favorite by a long shot. I found both X-Force and Wolverine to just be… slodgy.
Pretty sure Avengers 801 has already been solicited and still has McKay on the book. It seems to me that that the speeding up of the Missing Moment storyline, along with the arrival of a Bendis back-up in 800, both contributed to rumors of McKay getting pushed off earlier than otherwise planned. But at least for now he’s still on.
McKay’s continued Moon Knight run is a pretty interesting example to me of a creator staying “on a book” but in a pretty bumpy, lots of reboots kind of way. It started with a book called Moon Knight, which led after after a couple of years to a new volume of Vengeance of the Moon Knight, which led to the current Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu, which is about to end and be relaunched as another volume of Marc Spector: Moon Knight. Do we get to count that as an “uninterrupted” run?
It’s about the closest we get these days for a B/C-list character, though obviously it happens plenty with the A-listers as well. Al Ewing’s Immortal Thor was relaunched when it reached Act 2 of the story (as either Mortal Thor or just Thor, depending on where you’re looking). Then again I don’t think Al Ewing has ever had an uninterrupted run besides Immortal Hulk… (Avengers, Ultimates, SWORD/X-Men Red, Defenders, just everything has been relaunched in the middle or sequenced as minis or something like that.)
I do think that Jason Aaron’s Avengers was probably the most recent example of a non Amazing Spider-Man book to get past #50 without being relaunched mid-way. (Though his Thor run was split between three separate ongoings, an event, and two mini-series.) A few have made it TO #50 as Omar mentioned, but none past. And ASM only goes farther because it’s biweekly so 60-90 issues of that book is about the same 3-to-4-year shelf life for a run that the 30-50-issue books are also reaching.
By that metric, Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Cody Ziglar is due for an ending in the next year or so, as it’s in its mid-30s by now.
Today’s X-Men Mondays on AIPT had an interview with Steve Orlando. He had this to say about Wanda’s upcoming encounter with Madelyne Pryor:
As for Madelyne Pryor — her conflict with Wanda will hinge on the perilous ways of Limbo. Wanda and Madelyne have worked together before, with the world on the line. But that doesn’t automatically make them friends. After all, Doom himself has worked alongside the Avengers when the stakes fit. Wanda respects Madelyne and vice versa — enough so that when they crash against each other as dueling Sorcerers Supreme, they hold nothing back. Pryor brings out an edge to Wanda that we haven’t seen in a long time — but even that may not be enough to overcome the Sorcerer Supreme of Limbo.
@Staurt- Cody Ziglar’s Miles Morales: Spider-Man is ending with issue 42.
Another example of a creator staying on a book due to constant relaunches is Steve Orlando’s run on the Scarlet Witch. Orlando’s first Scarlet Witch series was cancelled after 10 issues. It was followed by a Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver limited series that lasted 4 issues. That was followed by a Scarlet Witch series that lasted 10 issues. That was followed by a Vision and the Scarelt Witch series that lasted 5 issues. That will be followed by a Sorcerer Supreme series.MacKay’s Moon Knight sometimes sells well for a B or C lister. But sales of Orlando’s Scarlet Witch have been horrible. If Marvel is committed to a Scarlet Witch book, I don’t know why they don’t just fire Orlando instead of constantly relaunching Wanda’s book.
@The Other Michael- Clearly Percy has the same blackmail material that Stephanie Phillips used to stay on Phoenix for so long.
> Stuart By that metric, Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Cody Ziglar is due for an ending in the next year or so, as it’s in its mid-30s by now.
Hasn’t it already been confirmed that January’s #42 is the end of that run?
You’re both right, I hadn’t realized that about Ziglar’s run. And it looks like in the new solicits that Avengers #36 (basically 802) will be McKay’s last on that book, so that is ending after all too.
@Michael, that Scarlet Witch thing is the same thing that happened with Black Cat’s McKay books as well. And it’s that exact pattern that makes me wonder if that’s what’s going on with Magik. Ten issues of her own book, a mini costarring a connected (male) character to drum up some mid-run interest, hopefully to be followed by her own book again. We’ll see!